The work can be insane and makes you question why anyone would be mad enough to forgo the easy path for this. The freedom is just way too good though. Often I'm not exactly sure what weekday it is. When I want to go on a vacation I usually decide that 1-3 days ahead and just go somewhere. Silksong was great too. There's absolutely nothing better. Thinking about a 9-5 office job now fills me with pure dread, I think it would break my soul.
Good luck, you should try to scale up the business and get 2-3 regular contractors (artists, designers, marketing folks) so you have somewhat of a team going. It helps when you have people on a project to throw the ball back and forth a bit.
edit:
But this part is wild to me: "I use AI for some things. It helped me fix a few bugs a couple of times"
I can't imagine being solo indie and not leaning hard into Codex, CC, or Composer at this point. To use it only sometimes for the rare bug or copy editing sounds tragic. It's been an incredible boon for me at least - extending, refactoring, prototyping etc. within a complex codebase I wrote myself and in new ones that I guide it on.
> It’s especially bad with new APIs.
It's great if you give it the context
I wouldn't say I wasted the good years on easy mode, but I did have a misguided plan that I needed to become a team lead and then I could start on my side projects.
I thought I'd have more time because I saw just how little my team leads actually did at work, and no, they weren't doing it behind the scenes, they wouldn't even show up to meetings with the business.
Of course I cared too much, burnt out my best years, quit and now have jack to show for it on the wrong side of 40 when I could have built up my own indie empire.
Some of us don't want to because we like our artisanal programming, and being indie is great because we don't have to capitulate to management forcing us to use AI all the time.
What's that saying? "If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life."
I use LLMs every day, but not to write my software. I use them like really good personal assistants. They are now a standard (and invaluable) part of my daily workflow.
I'm not exactly "indie" (retired at 55, and working for free), but I can relate to a lot of what's being discussed, here.
But now that I am finally free to write only software that I want to bring into the world, I cannot imagine playing roulette with LLMs all day for something as mundane as productivity, giving up all the intellectual joys of the craft as well.
And the relief of not having to justify to a manager why things are taking longer than expected! It's like the giant finger that had been pressing down on me almost all my working life has finally been lifted. Sweet semi-retirement, how I love thee.
I feel the same. Not having people crapping all over my work, is bliss.
I would have loved another decade of salary, but my savings were perfectly adequate for a reasonable retirement.
You two are retired or semi-retired and interested in the pleasure of coding apparently as an unpaid hobby. But I am speaking only to the utility of LLMs for business needs as an indie - the blog post is also about making a living as an indie and speaks to LLM use in terms of what they found productive. Indie in this case means independent business, not independently retired from business...
BTW: I didn't actually make that much money. Kids coming out of college, make more than I ever did, at my peak. I just lived very frugally, avoided personal debt, and saved and invested as best as I could.
I guarantee that a lot of folks here, would sneer at the way that I lived, and live now.
As I said I'm only semi-retired. There's a very expensive fortnightly life-saving medicine I depend on which I'm currently getting for free on a government programme. But it's tied to my current place of residence and other places in my country either don't offer it at all, or not to people who haven't been living there for decades. I would like to afford ending my dependence on the government programme because it might end someday anyway, and also so that I can travel a little.
All this is to say, if the newest AI tools actually increased my productivity, I would be stupid not to use them. But I haven't found that to be the case. It's fine to use for autocomplete and to look things up now and then, but every time I've had it generate a substantial amount of code it has messed things up and in the long run cost me the same amount of time I could have done the job in myself. And doing it myself has always been more engaging, fun and satisfying, and has left me with a much better understanding of a complex system that I'm going to have to maintain and extend for years.
I'm proud of all I've built and shared so far. But I still can't leave my day job. So at this point it's still 40/60.
At work, management asked if I'm willing to come back full-time and take over the team's leadership. No way. It's a costly game to play (huge opportunity cost), but the freedom is so valuable.
At one point I even built a live sales dashboard[1] to keep my dopamine in check, but a year later I realized it was a mistake. It started shaping my motivation instead of supporting it.
I guess the main lesson is that the ups and downs are normal, and you get better at riding them over the years.
Any advice for someone who's just planning to start their own indie journey?
Just bought a license!
I feel the opposite. I was more fearful of losing my regular job because that could be taken away from me overnight at the whim of a bad manager. However it would take a lot longer for everything I've built up to crumble away.
Good luck to all those still trying.
Monetization is always the tricky part, since most of the ideas I’m drawn to aren’t things a large audience would pay for. But working on projects I’m personally interested in is what keeps me motivated long enough to actually finish them. It’s easier now too, because AI lets me go from an idea to something usable in just a few hours.
I love the freedom and doing nothing when I don't feel like it is the most inspiring and creativity boosting thing I've ever tried.
Even in the times where money wasn't remotely enough, live was good and motivation was even higher.
It depends on your past job experience, if you had a cruisy job it's a wake up call, but if you've been working 16 hours a day and forced to be the jack of all trades because you have no support at the company, it's the same however you don't waste time in meetings, get more freedom and your efforts directly reward yourself.
The hardest part isn't the code. For me it's when I see VC-backed competitors with full teams. When I look back and remember working in a team of 20 devs with PMs and other support staff, it's hard to plough on alone. I'm glad of AI or this project would have been impossible. When my boy reads a story the app generated and asks if he can read another one, it makes it all feel worth it.
The loneliness is real. No one to bounce ideas off, no one to celebrate small wins with. Thinking about launching on HN soon just to find other builders in the EdTech space.
Still figuring it out. But my child is reading again, so that's a win for me.
You can find yourself in the same situation at a usual workplace.
What I would recommend to the "new indies":
- Build this on a side with a steady full-time job. If you can't get to a few thousand dollars per month by investing 2-3 hours per week day plus 10-20 hours on a weekend, going full time won't make a difference.
- If you have a family, be careful. You are making high risk decisions but people who depend on you didn't ask you to make a leap into unknown territory. Attempt to pull of indie business is stressful for everyone, may lead to years of strained relationship, and to a divorce.
- Do not share too much business information with your spouse. What is acceptable risk to you may cause dread to your significant other. They don't deserve all the emotional ups and downs that come with running a solo business. Absolutely do share important things because you are in this together - just don't frighten people whenever you are in a bad situation.
- Be mentally stable. If money is tight, if things are unknown, remember this was your choice.
- Don't be too proud - always be prepared to freelance or find a "real job" if needed. Remember that big success can take (many) years or it may never come. Do your best but do not self-destruct.
- Read "The E-Myth Revisited" to learn that your job changes. I was a spectacularly good developer when I started this. Today? Perhaps just a very good one because development turned out to be 10% of the job. You will wear many hats and some of those hats you will absolutely hate. You thought all you'll do is make state of the art software? Yeah, and you will also do sales, website, marketing, customer support, accounting, taxes. You will be exposed to all the shit you were blissfully unaware exists in business while at a steady job because it was someone else's job to handle all that. You will understand your past bosses much better.
All that said, I love the business I built. A beautiful lifestyle business for a quite a few years. It's a stable and growing business now, with a team of 20-ish people in 6 countries. We make great things, and have a great work-life balance.
You can do it, just don't sacrifice everything else. Nothing is certain but do your best. Always be kind to people. Remember to take care of the family first. Be there for them, spend time with them. Kids never grow up twice - what you missed, you missed for good.
(Edited for formatting)
In fact, I've been actively volunteering for the past four years, and no way I could do that without my flexible schedule that lets me just pause my work for a week and dedicate all my time to my community instead.
> It’s more chaotic and demanding than it looks, but also more rewarding in ways you don’t expect.
The first few lines immediately captured my attention because that's exactly how I've been feeling since going solo.
I left my big tech job about 5 months ago and started building my app - it's been a roller-coaster and I think this write-up summarizes how I've been feeling really well. I especially relate with the "constant decision making" - this can get exhausting; I definitely get decision fatigue frequently lol
dmezzetti•2mo ago